Section B·Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Nation/World
Thursday, April 15, 1999
Yugoslavia blames NATO for death of 64 refugees
The Associated Press
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — As NATO warplanes hammered Serb targets in Kosovo yesterday, Yugoslavia said one of the strikes hit a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees under Serb police escort, killing at least 64 and wounding 20.
NATO confirmed its aircraft carried out controlled attacks on military vehicles.
"The aircraft was fired on by anti-aircraft artillery and a manned portable surface-to-air missile. The pilots state they attacked only military vehicles," NATO said in a statement. "We cannot confirm press reports alleging that these attacks may have caused civilian casualties."
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said NATO was still investigating but there was no indication its planes hit civilians.
Bacon said U.S. Army Gen, Wesley Clark, one of NATO's top commanders, told him in a telephone conversation
that he had received "verbal reports of the possibility" that after military vehi-
clines in the refugee convoy were hit, "military people got out and ... began to attack civilians in the middle of the convoy."
"We don't know what the full facts are." Bacon said.
Earlier,
Bacon said
UIN relief
Milosevic His governement said NATO killed 64 civilians
workers had reported to NATO that refugees entering Albania had claimed refugee convoy were being attacked by Yugoslav planes and helicopters.
Video taken under Serb control showed smashed bodies scattered along a roadway, damaged farm vehicles and bombed out farm buildings nearby. People in rough peasant cloth
ing, some with blood streaming down their faces, loaded bodies of the dead and wounded into trunks of cars or wheelbarrows to transport them.
The Serb-run Media Center in the Kosovo capital, Pristina, said two refugee convoyes were bombed, most of them made up of women, children and elderly ethnic Albanians being escorted by Serbian police.
Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman Neboja Vujevic, who along with the media center reported a figure of 64 dead, denounced the strike as a "crime against humanity."
If the account were true, it would be the largest single loss of civilian life reported during the NATO bombing campaign.
NATO has said repeatedly that it held Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic responsible for the safety of ethnic Albanians driven from their homes in Kosovo but unable to leave the province. Estimates have put the number of displaced within Kosovo in the hundreds of thousands.
Tax time ticks out at midnight
IRS expects millions to send last-minute electronic returns
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — For millions of procrastinating Americans, it's time to face the music: Income tax returns must be postmarked or filed electronically by midnight tonight, and that's expected to mean 40 million last-minute state and federal returns.
Hundreds of larger post offices around the country will be open late to accommodate the crush, many of the biggest will stay open until midnight local time. And taxpayers who file electronically have until the last minute to zap their returns to the Internal Revenue Service.
A reminder: If you can't finish in time, file for an extension using Form 4868 and pay the IRS as much of your estimated bill as possible to avoid interest and penalties. You can also pay by MasterCard, American Express or Discover card by calling 1-888-2PAYTAX — for a 2.5 percent fee.
The IRS expects to receive 126 million individual income tax returns this year, with total income taxes projected at $828.6 billion. That's just under half the $1.7 trillion in overall federal tax collections used to pay for everything from cruise missiles to highway bridges to food stamps.
Working people pay more in U.S. taxes than more than 40,000 foreign-controlled corporations operating in this country. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported yesterday that tax loopholes allowed a majority of those companies to escape any taxes in 1995 — an amount estimated at $55 billion a year.
"It's part of citizenship here, but these corporations are getting by in many cases with a free ride," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who released the study.
Still, mainly because of new child and education credits, Americans are enjoying much larger refunds at
$1.563 on average, or 15 percent above last year. And they've used computers to electronically file 21.1 million returns, almost 24 percent more than last year.
But the jury is still out on whether the much-publicized IRS reform law is making the agency treat taxpayer better. Senate Finance Committee Chairman William Roth, whose hearings last year helped spark the reforms, said he believes only about 20 percent of all IRS employees support the changes.
Studies about bone marrow transplant value may cause controversy
"Typically, a bureaucracy will say, 'We'll just wait it out,'" said Roth, R-Del. "We're talking about changing attitudes."
IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti, however, told the Finance Committee on Wednesday about key changes. They include a new service-oriented mission statement, ways to rate employees that don't include enforcement quotas and a reorganization to create four separate operations aimed at individual taxpayers, small businesses, large corporations and tax-exempt entities.
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Cancer researchers and patients are expecting long-awaited studies on bone marrow transplants in treating advanced breast cancer to have inconclusive results. Researchers are bracing for new controversy about whether women should undergo the costly and difficult treatment.
Before the data are released today, researchers are working to ensure that insurance companies continue to pay for the treatment.
have absolutely definitive studies."
"The real dilemma we're in is—what happens now?" said Harmon Eyre, a physician, of the American Cancer Society. "We think it's important that women still have the procedure covered until we
The therapy can cost $50,000 to $150,000, and dying patients have sued insurance companies to force coverage. Nine states have mandated payments.
At issue is an aggressive treatment reserved for the most advanced breast cancer: Ultrahigh doses of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant to repair the immune system destruction caused by such high-dose therapy.
But there is no scientific proof that women undergoing the risky and painful procedure do better long-term than women given standard doses of chemotherapy and radiation.
Still, an estimated 6,000 Americans had the experimental treatment last year, less than 10 percent of whom entered clinical trials designed to determine if it's effective.
Today, the American Society for Clinical Oncology will release preliminary results from the first four major studies of bone marrow transplant therapy. People familiar with the research said that overall, the results are equivocal.
The scientist who led the largest
Why do women flock to an unproven treatment? Because the prognosis for advanced breast cancer is extremely grim. When cancer spreads to other organs, called metastatic disease, only 22 percent of patients survive five years. Some 43,000 women will die of breast cancer this year.
study and believed the treatment could work warned that the research was not complete yet.
"It's too early to draw conclusions," stressed William Peters, a physician, of the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. He said at least three more years of study was required.
Peters said today's data would include some encouraging news.
"If it were going to show a clear benefit, those data would have been out months ago, and they would have stopped (the studies) early," said Fran Visco of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. Visco has discussed the research with investigators and advises women now considering a bone
But others questioned how good the news could be.
Some doctors are eager to see if certain subgroups of patients responded better to bone marrow transplants, or if one type of high-dose chemotherapy worked better than another.
marrow transplant to look carefully at today's data.
now will insurance companies interpret the findings? Many won't make coverage decisions until they see more in-depth data from the studies, scheduled to be released next month at a major cancer meeting and then published in medical journals, said Don Young of the American Association of Health Plans, a physician.
"The trials will leave open as many questions as they answer," cautioned Stephen Forman of City of Hope National Medical Center, a.
physician. He offers bone marrow transplants and said patients, who were expecting to die, had lived significantly longer with them.
Today's studies have flaws: They began 10 years ago, and both standard cancer treatments and the bone marrow transplants have improved since then. Also, too few cancer patients agreed to be in studies where they might be given a standard chemotherapy instead of the bone marrow transplant they desired.
"The tragedy here is that we would have had the answer years ago," Visco said. "Physicians did not insist that that happen. Patients were told, 'This is the only thing that could possibly save your life.' That's why we're in the situation we are today."
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